Anyone can be a detective, but there's only one Sherlock Holmes. Let's talk about why he's a great character This is your weekly Fark Writer's Thread, Deduction Edition [CSB]

Skip to content Try Ads-Free Fark It's Not News, It's Fark How To FarkLog In | Sign Up » Forgot password? Turn on javascript (or enable it for Fark) for a better user experience. If you can read this, either the style sheet didn't load or you have an older browser that doesn't support style sheets. Try clearing your browser cache and refreshing the page. Discussion Entertainment Anyone can be a detective, but there's only one Sherlock Holmes. Let's talk about why he's a great character This is your weekly Fark Writer's Thread, Deduction Edition (farkfiction.net) 83 clicks;posted toMain »and Discussion »on 22 Oct 2025 at2:56 PM(46 minutes ago) | Favorite | Watch | share: Copy Link 11 Comments Enable JavaScript for Fark in order to vote for entries. Log in (at the top of the page) to enable voting. View Voting Results:SmartestandFunniest (3) Funniest Today we're starting off a new Writer's Thread idea, profiling characters instead of authors, in the hopes of finding out what makes them work (or not!) or what makes them relatable to the reader (or not!) You can't have much of a story that interests humans without humans or human analogues being involved, and since they're the most basic building blocks of a good story, they're worth studying for our own writing. So let's start off with Russell_Secord and Sherlock Holmes! Arthur Conan Doyle created one of the most popular and recognizable characters in all of fiction. What is it, though, that makes Sherlock Holmes such an iconic character? What lessons can we as writers learn from his example? These are my thoughts, what are yours? While studying medicine, Doyle began writing stories. He drew inspiration from Doctor Joseph Bell, a teacher of his in Edinburgh, who keenly observed details and drew conclusions from them. In 1886 he sold "A Study in Scarlet," the first Holmes story, for 25 pounds, and it was published in 1887. The response was electric. Doyle resented the time Holmes took away from his "real" job, but his fans were never satisfied, even after Doyle killed off Holmes in 1893; he had to resurrect his creation. He would produce four books and fifty-six short stories featuring Holmes. The most obvious feature of Holmes is timing. Edgar Allan Poe is credited with the first true detective story ("The Murders in the Rue Morgue," 1841), but the Holmes stories take mystery to another level. He is almost compulsive in the way he finds clues and unravels their significance. He studies everything from cryptography to cigar butts to the effects of someone's profession on their fingers. At a time when classic science seemed to have hit a brick wall, Doyle made forensics a new and exciting field of study. As a person, Holmes is dauntingly intelligent, but he can make mistakes. He has no time for socializing, but he is Doctor Watson's best friend. He employs a group of children as spies and couriers, he's a master of disguise, he deals with the worst of humanity, but he's painfully awkward with women. For every good quality, he has a balancing flaw. As a character, Holmes is partly a wizard, able to see things others can't and to read intentions... and yet he's partly a knight, protecting the innocent and fighting evil. He combines those folkloric qualities with the modern virtues of science and vast knowledge. He is a true hero for the industrial age. Holmes is imposing on his own, but we see him from Watson's sympathetic perspective. He restores order to the world after a murder, the ultimate breach of the social contract. Despite his exploits, though, he has no special abilities, so anyone can do the things he does. He is a hero because of his own efforts, not because the gods favor him. (0) Funniest Bonus profile: Dr. Watson! You can't possibly talk about Sherlock Holmes without mentioning his sidekick, Dr. Watson, who serves as the eyes and voice of the reader. In every way that Holmes is eccentric or odd, Watson is his opposite: he's often emotionally driven as a counterpoint to Holmes' dry analytical mind. He is unimaginative, lacking Sherlock's brilliant insights; he's a doctor, warning Holmes against his inclinations to alleviate boredom through cocaine use. While some representations of Doyle's work show Holmes as a buffoonish comic sidekick (looking at you, Nigel Bruce) he's most commonly shown to be brave, resourceful, and once he's observed enough of Holmes' deductive process, a capable detective in his own right: in The Hound of the Basekervilles Sherlock compliments him on his ability to have untangled several of the plot threads by himself. Watson is a trained medical doctor, an ex-military man, and a ladies' man, all of which are understandable to the audience, and more relatable than the weird and eccentric Sherlock Holmes. This allows Doyle to use him as a stand-in for the reader and explain the intricacies of any mystery naturally. This character-as-presentation-device pattern was so successful that practically every Great Detective since then has had a Great Sidekick: Agatha Christie's Poirot had Captain Hastings, Inspector Morse has Sergeant Lewis, even Dr. House had his Dr. Wilson to serve the same role in medical mysteries. The two characters together provide an elegant method to show, don't tell how brilliant the Great Detective is: by making cryptic comments which show the internals of the detective's thought processes, we can guide the reader towards the ultimate reveal as the mystery is solved. In 1929, English crime writer and critic Ronald Knox stated that "the stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader." This allows the reader to make the leaps of deduction along with the detective, and find out if they were right or wrong when the case is finally closed. Writer's Thread Question of the Week! How would you create a classic detective and sidekick pair, to fulfil the Holmes/Watson roles, while still being original? (1) Funniest Fark Fiction Anthology Update! At this point, everyone who submitted to this year's anthology and received a receipt email should have also received a response with either a notice of acceptance, or an email with some explanation and critique as for why we might not have accepted it. If you submitted to this year's anthology and have not heard back from me, drop me a line at editorsnoitcifkrafnet and I'll look into it! Next up, I'll take a few weeks to do a full line edit pass (well, mostly apply the edits from all the readers, really) to all accepted submissions, and then get those back out to the submitters for a final yes/no to make sure we don't end up publishing something that terribly goes against the author's intent. Once that's done, there'll be a few more weeks to let everyone go over those, and then we'll get the whole thing put together and up on Amazon. Huge thanks to everyone who's submitted and worked on this year's anthology! Any Pie Left (1) Funniest less than a minute ago Would you consider Holmes to be on the autism spectrum? Yet high- functioning. Today's best variation on the Holmes model IMO might be Adrian Monk. He even has his own version of Brother Mycroft. Loved that show. High Potential seems in the same mold, I like it. If I was trying to generate a new take on observational detectives, I might point to either an AI like Person of Interest, or a super nerd like the lone gunmen, maybe one who is house bound and a keyboard warrior, their Watson would be their representative in the field. It's super hard to come up with a fresh take that hasn't been done already in some way. Diasabled Holmes, gender swapped Holmes, child aged Holmes, artificial Holmes, Doyle set the example for the ages. (2) Funniest less than a minute ago One has to understand that he was written to pay the bills, as it were, and did not have to be consistent from one story to the next. In A Study in Scarlet (1887), Watson lists Holmes' knowledge deficits - "next to nothing" of philosophy, astronomy, or literature, and famously "knew nothing of Copernicus." But by The Valley of Fear and The Bruce-Partington Plans, Holmes quotes Goethe, discusses astronomy, and displays wide-ranging cultural and historical literacy. Likely explanation: Doyle didn't expect to be writing dozens more stories when he wrote the first. In The Sign of Four, Holmes injects a 7% cocaine solution regularly and Watson scolds him for it. In later stories like The Missing Three-Quarter and The Adventure of the Devil's Foot, Watson says Holmes has long since abandoned "that drug mania." Yet, in The Adventure of the Creeping Man (one of the last stories written), Holmes casually mentions a syringe again, suggesting Doyle forgot the moral cleanup he'd given him. In The Adventure of the Speckled Band, Holmes says, "My profession is its own reward." Yet he negotiates fees (The Adventure of the Priory School) and occasionally displays near mercenary zeal - refusing to act until a rich client pays up. In The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez, he claims he never takes cases "except for the love of my art," contradicting multiple earlier episodes where payment clearly motivates him. Early Holmes brags about being "a calculating machine" and derides emotion as a weakness (The Sign of Four). Yet by The Three Garridebs, he's visibly shaken at Watson's injury: "If you had killed Watson, you would not have got out of this room alive." And he calls himself "a brain without a heart" in The Adventure of the Copper Beeches-only to spend later stories showing very human empathy and moral fervor. In A Scandal in Bohemia, Holmes is almost caricatured as misogynistic, declaring women "never to be entirely trusted." Yet his admiration for Irene Adler ("the woman") and later tenderness toward Violet Hunter and Kitty Winter contradict that. In The Adventure of the Lion's Mane, written as if by Holmes himself, he displays warmth and sympathy for multiple women, something early Holmes would have scorned. Holmes alternates between cigars, cigarettes, and pipes - but at least once (The Man with the Twisted Lip), Watson claims he only smokes pipes. He also alternates between total asceticism (The Adventure of the Cardboard Box) and lavish consumption (fine wines, expensive suits). Mrs. Hudson's first name, number of servants, and even the floor layout of 221B change from story to story. Holmes' violin alternately is a Stradivarius (bought for £55 in A Study in Scarlet) and just "a violin" in later tales. Holmes survives a fall over Reichenbach Falls (The Final Problem), an event that would pulp most people, and reappears after years in Tibet and Persia (The Empty House). But in other stories, written later but set earlier, Watson describes him as pale, sedentary, and even fragile. Doyle never really resolved how old Holmes was at any given point - his age would make him impossibly spry by His Last Bow (1914). Holmes retires to Sussex to keep bees in His Last Bow-yet later stories (The Adventure of the Lion's Mane) are set after that retirement, as if he briefly came out of it. Cases supposedly from "early in his career" feature references to later events, and vice versa. Watson's marital status shifts wildly - sometimes single, sometimes married, sometimes widowed - apparently depending on what Doyle needed for the story. (0) Funniest less than a minute ago Why? Elementary my dear Farkers. jackmalice (0) Funniest less than a minute ago There have been many adaptations of Sherlock Holmes. One stands out above the rest. (0) Funniest less than a minute ago THIS RIGHT HERE! frestcrallen (0) Funniest less than a minute ago I always recommend Mark Frost's 1993 novel 'The List of 7' for Holmes aficionados. It's a Holmes origin story of sorts, with Arthur Conan Doyle as the protagonist. Good fun. (0) Funniest less than a minute ago What made him a good character and good stories is that the stories led the readers to the answer without giving them away or treating the reader like an idiot unlike the Moffat series which just had him be a savant and figure crazy shiat out and then just explain them AT the consumer of the media. The way he was written it brought the reader in like they were helping solve the cases with sherlock. He does an amazing job at it. fatassbastard (0) Funniest less than a minute ago italie: Why? Elementary my dear Farkers. Also, he never took no shiat. Displayed 11 of 11 comments Enable JavaScript for Fark in order to vote for entries. Log in (at the top of the page) to enable voting. View Voting Results:SmartestandFunniest Redisplay/refresh comments If you're having problems voting, quoting, or posting comments, try disabling any browser add-ons that might disable Javascript (NoScript, AdBlock, etc).See our FAQ. Forgot password? 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